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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

IBM and Oracle Go Head-to-Head for Splunk Buyout

Hot on the heels of Dell’s rumored mega-buyout, rival firm IBM is reported to be flexing its own financial muscles as it looks to make data analytics firm Splunk its first major acquisition of the year.

Once again it was Bloomberg who first jumped on the story, adding that Oracle may also be eying up the big data firm, possibly sparking a bidding war between them and ‘Big Blue’.

The report emphasizes that IBM is the most likely to make a move for the big data firm however. Splunk, which offers analysis and monitoring tools that help businesses to gain insights from their data, previously made headlines last April when it became the first big data company to go public.

For IBM, the move would make sense as it looks to strengthen its own data analytics offering. IBM is already something of a leader in this field, having acquired a number of data analysis firms over the last year, including Varicent Software and Vivisimo.

Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT, told the V3 website that given IBM’s stated goals for the future, and Splunk’s own superb data analysis products, the two companies would seem to be a perfect match for each other:

“Splunk’s focus on gathering [and] analysing machine-generated data with the intent of using that intelligence to improve business processes and decision making is right down IBM’s alley technologically and could certainly fit into a range of the company’s analytics solutions,” said King.

“Just as importantly, the intent of Splunk’s solutions is in line with what many if not most IBM enterprise customers hope to achieve with IT.”

Even so, IBM may not have it all their own way, as Bloomberg suggests that Oracle may try to steal their thunder and come in with an even bigger bid for Splunk.

Oracle has stepped up its own focus on data analytics in recent years, in spite of comments by company president Mark Hurd, who once famously labelled big data as “worthless”. To this end, Oracle brought out its own data analytics tool last January, and this would obviously benefit massively if the company were to pair up with Splunk.

For Splunk meanwhile, the company appears to be in a win-win situation, especially if it can tactfully spark off a bidding war between to the two firms. Its share price has already been given a major boost, jumping by more than 8% since news of the potential deal first emerged.

About Mike Wheatley

Mike Wheatley is a senior staff writer at SiliconANGLE. He loves to write about Big Data and the Internet of Things, and explore how these technologies are evolving and helping businesses to become more agile.
Before joining SiliconANGLE, Mike was an editor at Argophilia Travel News, an occassional contributer to The Epoch Times, and has also dabbled in SEO and social media marketing. He usually bases himself in Bangkok, Thailand, though he can often be found roaming through the jungles or chilling on a beach.
Got a news story or tip? Email Mike@SiliconANGLE.com.